ENVY
In an Italian city, a beautiful tower was built which was admired by everyone that passed by. A little distance down the road in a neighbouring city they built a tower of equal beauty.
However, the people of the neighbouring city were filled with envy and planned to destroy the tower of the first city so that there would be more attention on thiers. So, at night the used shovels and pick axes to silently undermine the foundations of the tower of the first city.
In the morning, without anyone noticing, the tower was already leaning slightly and this went on for few days until a little girl passed by and said “I think this tower will soon fall” and everyone paid attention and discovered she was right.
The whole city started to panic and they tried every means to straighten the tower but nothing seemed to work. Then one day, the same little girl was passing by and leant her arm on the tower, she felt the tower slighting creaking and when she removed her hand it stopped and she tried again but same thing.
After several moments doing this, she discovered the “tower is ticklish”!
She got some plants and flowers and planted them next to the tower so that if the tower decides to lean further it would be tickled by the plants and being a ticklish tower, it would return to where it had been.
And that’s how the girl helped in not letting the tower collapse and the fact the tower was leaning even made the tower more famous. Being the envious type, the people of the second city decided to copy the lean of the first tower but it ended up collapsing leaving the city without a tower and even a city hall.
According to the dictionary, envy is the desire to have a quality, possession or other desirable thing belonging to someone else. The first recorded case of envy is that of Cain killing his brother Abel. When God found Abel’s offering to him of the first of his flock of sheep acceptable and Cain’s offering of the fruit of the ground less acceptable, it was too much for Cain, the older brother, to bear. I don’t think I give away the plot when I quote Genesis (4:8): “And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”
Envious people tend to feel angry, irritable, resentful and hostile. Such individuals are also less likely to be grateful about the positive things happening to them. Envy can be related to the development of prejudice and personal unhappiness.
What actually has the world designated as enviable? At a certain level of generality things like wealth, beauty, power, talent and skill, knowledge and wisdom, and extraordinary good luck and let me add youth: Some of these items are gifts received at birth; some are acquired at the expense of hard work and serious effort. In the best of all worlds, one would be rich, beautiful, powerful, laden with talent, wise and knowledgeable and (given the foregoing) obviously hugely fortunate. But In the real world, one is considered fairly lucky if in possession of any one of these items. These items are enviable qualities in the real world.
If one does have one or more than one of these enviable qualities, the chances are great that it is not what they actually wanted. For example most immensely handsome men turn out to be rather slow witted; perhaps their handsomeness has made it easier for them not to have to work at cultivating their intelligence. The rich want to be beautiful or wish themselves intelligent. F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “I didn’t have the top two things, great animal magnetism or money. I had the second two things, though, good looks and intelligence.”
Anyway, Helmut Schoeck in his book on envy makes the point that real envy is reserved not for the great or the greatly gifted, but for those whose situation seems only slightly better than ours. “Overwhelming and astounding inequality,” he writes, “especially when it has an element of the unattainable, arouses far less envy than minimal inequality, which inevitably causes the envious to think: ‘I might have been in his place.’”
Just like it’s almost Impossible to envy Bill Gates who is not a hugely attractive human being in any case, but it can be irritating to learn that someone doing the same work you do is paid $30,000 a year more. Its easy to envy the lucky: people who, inexplicably, just happen to have been in the right place at the right time, or been put on to a good thing, or seem to have the mysterious touch that makes money, attracts love, puts them in the perpetually advantageous position.
Studies such as Robert H. Frank’s Luxury Fever have shown that people would agree to make less total money so long as they make more than their neighbours: that is, they would rather earn, say, $95,000 a year where no one else is making more than $75,000 instead of $150,000 where everyone else is making $175,000..
I would implore you to consider envy as very poor mental hygiene. It blocks out clarity, both about yourself and the people one envies, and it ends by giving one a poor and terrible opinion of oneself. No one can see clearly anything what he or she envies. Envy clouds the mind and thought process, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shrivelling the heart. Its enough reason enough to fight free of it with all one’s mental strength..